Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
30 lines (16 loc) · 4.17 KB

project-history.md

File metadata and controls

30 lines (16 loc) · 4.17 KB
Raw

Past scanning efforts

From 2011 to 2015, Ben Balter, a staffer within the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Executive Office of the President and later a Presidential Innovation Fellow, performed an analysis of federal.gov domains.

Later in 2015, Jon Tindle (OGP), Eric Mill (TTS), and Gray Brooks (TTS) built https://pulse.cio.gov/ and the two open-source site scanners that gather the data for that website: the use of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) and participation in the government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP). Between 2016-2017, three other scanners were prototyped by Eric Mill, but are not currently deployed: participation in the U.S. Web Design System, Accessibility, and the use of third-party services.

In 2016, OGP built https://digitaldashboard.gov/, which incorporates results from the Pulse HTTPS and DAP scans, as well as accessibility, mobile-responsiveness, IPv6, and Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). Results are available to Federal employees behind a secure login.

Between 2015 - 2017, DHS builts scans for HTTPS and Trusted Email to help assess whether agencies were in compliance with Binding Operational Directives. From these scans, DHS generates weekly “cyber hygiene reports” and sends these PDFs to agencies.

Early program history

  • 2016-2017 - Eric Mill prototypes USWDS, Accessibility, and Third-party Services scans.
  • July 2018 - Eric Mills submits an idea to 10x (full text below) to address the inability to easily scan sites for federal website best practices and standards. At the time there is no actively-maintained scanning infrastructure in production, no long-term solution for storing results (cloud.gov sandbox), and site scanning is not architected to be replicable (for interested parties to stand up their own copy of site scans) or extensible (for new, custom scans to be added to the suite). He proposes 10x to build a cloud-based tool that automatically scans federal sites so federal employees could use to see what's behind these sites.
  • Fall 2018 - 10x funds Site Scanner. Phase 1 begins. Phase 1 team finds in support of the idea and requests Phase 2 funding.
  • Summer 2019 - 10x funds Site Scanner Phase 2. Team develops initial product strategy, and launches prototypes of Site Scanner.
  • Fall 2019 - Phase 2 team launches the Site Scanner website which includes 200 and USWDS scanner search results, individual pages for /code.json, /data.json, /data, /developer, /digitalstrategy, /open, /privacy, /robots.txt, and /sitemap.xml 200 scans, and various data export options aimed at technical users. Team finds in support of the idea and requests Phase 3 funding.
  • Winter 2019 - 2020 - 10x funds Site Scanner Phase 3. Team refines product strategy, continues outreach, and develops a customizable UI for Site Scanner.

    • Original 10x pitch for Site Scanning

    TTS drives the adoption of digital best practices and policy, from mobile-friendliness to online privacy and security - but we currently lack comprehensive, timely data to measure our success. This proposal builds on prior art to create a scanning service that discovers federal websites, then analyzes and presents actionable intelligence for more than 30,000 federal websites on the presence of web trackers and customer feedback tools, USWDS adoption, and security best practices. Data is collected at regular intervals and stored in the cloud, and accessible via a web-based interface that enables staff from any government agency to see information about their programs.